Dynamical Priors as a Training Objective in Reinforcement Learning
Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as abrupt confidence shifts, oscillations, or degenerate inactivity. We introduce Dynamical Prior Reinforcement Learning (DP-RL), a training framework that augments policy gradient learning with an auxiliary loss derived from external state dynamics that implement evidence accumulation and hysteresis. Without modifying the reward, environment, or policy architecture, this prior shapes the temporal evolution of action probabilities during learning. Across thre...
| Authors | Sukesh Subaharan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 23 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 April 2026 |
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